Any experts on SSDs? 30gb missing.

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by theHollyWood, Dec 23, 2013.

  1. theHollyWood

    theHollyWood Private E-2

    I had two SSDs in RAID0, they were older Corsair Force 3 SATA III drives. Recently I upgraded to one Samsung 840 EVO that has performance benchmarks of about 3x-5x faster speeds than the older drives which had Sandforce controllers.

    While doing this I remembered that I had an issue on the previous SSDs of used space that didn't show up in any folders. Looking at the properties of the host c: drive, it shows that 73.4 GBs are used. Opening up the primary drive and selecting all of the folders it displays that 47.1 GBs are used for all the files and programs.

    Is this a problem with the OS and or paging file using 26.3 GBs of space?

    Also I have another problem, when I cloned the drive it kept the RAID0 array in BIOS and I can't switch over to AHCI mode. When I do so it fails to boot and goes to blue screen and does a restart. So in order to get to the OS I have to keep the RAID setting in BIOS.

    Please see attached screenshots.
     

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    theHollyWood, Dec 23, 2013
    #1
  2. theHollyWood

    theHollyWood Private E-2

    Here is a clear screenshot of my system information. It looks like the virtual memory and paging file are larger then they should be with a system that has 16gb of RAM.
     

    Attached Files:

    theHollyWood, Dec 23, 2013
    #2
  3. DavidGP

    DavidGP MajorGeeks Forum Administrator - Grand Pooh-Bah Staff Member

    Hi

    In general while you can image/clone a RAID array, and they will migrate onto a single drive, in practice they have driver issues as you are noticing now with AHCI, I myself and others I know do start from scratch if doing from RAID to a single drive, less hassle in the long run, yes you have to re-install all software and make sure you use the Windows Easy Transfer app to grab some settings and saved files, plus also manually backup any files in non standard documents folders.

    The problem lies in the cloned drives have the driver set Motherboard and Storage for a RAID array, drastic steps some have tried are to backup/clone drive, delete the RAID drivers, enter BIOS and delete any setup RAID array, then set to AHCI and save and exit, then restore your cloned image and see how that works.

    I would say that you can leave as RAID to boot too, shouldn't impact a great deal on performance of the single drive as AHCI is a subset of RAID anyways as on many motherboards and I know Intel chip ones as soon as you enable RAID you get AHCI capabilities also.


    What software did you clone the drive with?


    As for space you have clones a drive from likely a different size drive/s, so check in Disk Management what all of your drives and partitions are slowing. [See below from my desktop], what I would be looking for is a RAW unused section of drive space, that you will need to merge with the main partition.

    What I would do as well is do a bit of cleanup and clear the pagefile and then check the pagefile settings for multiple pagefiles and possibly leave a token one of 50mb fixed on your C drive and move the main pagefile to your Vertex 2

    Do you use hibernation, if not then disable that as it can take up some space.

    Plus follow this here to do a bit more drive maintenance with. Can also check what your drive is using as to space and by what software with this software WizTree (there are other apps that do same job but I chose this one as its the most current developed one)



    **If going to attempt any driver changes do please make sure you clone/image your PC first as its not the best option to retro-remove and install drivers from being a RAID setup to SATA, personally I would clean install, after resetting the BIOS to default and checking that no RAID arrays are setup and AHCI is set**
     

    Attached Files:

    DavidGP, Dec 24, 2013
    #3
  4. theHollyWood

    theHollyWood Private E-2

    I used Samsung Data Migration, a basic imaging utility to clone the drives.

    Doing the other steps in moving the page file to the other SSDs, I still don't see the benefit of having 32gb of paging files.

    The Samsung Magician utility sets the hibernation to off in one of the settings. So I believe I am good on the performance side of things. Microsoft should really have presets for higher end computers, so they don't default to the 16gb page file.

    Thanks for the help (how do I locate the thank button?).

    Here are some more screen shots
     

    Attached Files:

    theHollyWood, Dec 25, 2013
    #4
  5. satrow

    satrow Major Geek Extraordinaire

    32GB is at least 30GB of valuable space wasted, imo. On a dual SSD system, I'd create a 100MB page file on the System drive plus a variable 1024-4092 on the second (if both SSDs are the same, the secondary drive should do almost all of the paging).

    On a single SSD, try a 100-1024MB and check the "Currently allocated" figure (where you change the page file settings) during heavy sessions over the first few weeks, if it's never above the minimum 100MB, you should be fine for the vast majority of your usage.

    If you want to remove the page file from the System drive and you use W7, install this patch in case of BSOD problems at some point: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2716542
     
    satrow, Dec 25, 2013
    #5

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